Comics at War - First Conflict

 

Recently whilst reading the latest issue of Battling Britons - ,the excellent new magazine from Justin Marriott -  I was struck by the realization that war stories have been a staple of comic books for as long as the medium's existed.

 It is said that at any point in time, on some foreign field, the British Army is fighting one war or other, and I suppose in many ways British history has been shaped by events on the battlefields. From Lion Heart's crusades to the current struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, stories have echoes down the centuries and inspired poets, novelists, storytellers of all kinds.

So it would seem natural that children's literature, the forerunner of the modern comic book, would turn its attention to war stories with early titles such as Boy's Own Paper, and Halfpenny Marvel churning out tales set during the Crimean and Napoleonic Wars. It is interesting to note that early war comics and story papers concentrated on war at sea which reflected Britain's pride in having a Navy that then truly ruled the waves.

War stories were part of a mix of tales that included sport, crime, western and adventure but by the end of the Nineteenth Century, with the country gripped by the wars against the Boer, comics and story papers started to present patriotic tales with these struggles as the backdrop. Fictional stories would sit alongside reports of true accounts of heroism and gradually comic books and the story papers became part of the national consciousness.

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The real boom started in the mid 19th Century when the literacy rates were rising in Britain thanks to the sterling work done by social reformers, and when William Gladstone, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, abolished duty on paper mass market publishing was able to come about. A number of entrepreneurs turned their attentions to the growing boys fiction market. Kids across the country, unable to find X-Boxes or Playstations in the shops, were eager for entertainment. Cheap fiction was hugely in demand by working class children who could not afford to buy books - Alice in Wonderland for instance which was first published in 1865 cost 6 shillings. This was a third of the average industrial worker's weekly wage. However children could manage a penny a week and this brought in the era of what would become to be known as the penny dreadfuls.

A popular title of this period was The Boys of England which sold, at its peak, around 250,000 copies a week but given that each copy would be shared by around nine different readers it was estimated that its readership was more than two million.

Edwin Brent started his Newsagents Publishing Company in 1866 and as well as being responsible for the aforementioned The Boys of England, realized that there was a market for more salacious reading material, and he started churning out the first penny dreadfuls. These magazines were, in effect, part work novels with subjects that covered murder, street violence and other lurid subjects. Brett's published, The Wild Boys of London in 1866, which was a tale of juvenile street criminals in the capital city and this title became particularly notorious. It contains violence, mentions of nudity and a flagellation (torture) scene and it sold like the proverbial hot cakes and started the boom in the penny dreadfuls,  which would soon come to the attention of politicians.

'The malign influence of the "bloods" (penny dreadfuls) was creeping not only into the houses of the poor, neglected and untaught, but into the largest mansions; penetrating into religious families  and astounding careful parents with its frightful issues.'  Lord Shaftsbury, speaking in the House of Commons in 1878.

A moral backlash followed and fearing that soon issues would be forced out of publication, many publishers started to clean up their act. In 1879, the Religious Tract Society first published, The Boy's Own Paper, which would go onto become one of the most enduring and popular of boy's story papers. The first issue featured sport stories, adventure stories and for the first time in a boy's magazines, stories about the perceived glories of warfare. There were also features on hobbies, nature and health. One story, From Powder Monkey to Admiral, started in the early issues and across its run told of how an ordinary boy from the working classes joined the Navy and gradually worked his way to the highest rank. This may seem unlikely but, in fact, history proves otherwise and the story was very much influenced by the life of Admiral Edward Hopson, a boy of humble stock who did indeed attain the rank of Admiral.

War stories then were a stable of The Boy's Own Paper from its early issues. Largely these stories told of The Crimean War (1853-1856) or the Napoleonic Wars but there were stores that dealt with the French (1793 - 1815) and the Indian Mutiny of 1857. All of these stories were driven by a feeling of patriotism and national pride, but did not always see things from the British perspective. One story, The Drummer Boy (1881) told of a young boy conscripted into the French army for Napoleon's ill-fated Russian campaign of 1812.

In 1880 another titles was published. The Union Jack was billed as a magazine of 'healthy, stirring tales of adventure by  Land and Sea for Boys'. It was priced at one penny and it was hugely popular and offered strong competition to the Boy's Own Paper. Most of the stories were set in previous wars but the magazine did become the first title to set stories on campaigns which were then ongoing. In 1882 the magazine published a story that looked at the Sudan Campaign. Readers lapped the magazine up but after 129 weekly issues it ceased publication. However by this time there was no shortage of reading material. New titles were launched at a speedy rate. These magazines, lavishly illustrated,  were all text based stories, and the dawn of the first true comic was still some way off but it was these magazines that were very much the parents of the modern comic book.

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World War Comic - Warlord and Battle Picture Weekly

Growing up comic books were of vital importance - They mattered to a young boy. There were just another of the essentials needed for any kind of  life. As every young boy knew the true necessities for a happy life were food, water, shelter, assorted candy and comic books.

It wasn't like today where you can grab a DVD

from a shelf, switch on a computer or fire up a video game. This was pre-home computer, pre cable television, even VHS video tapes were still some time in the future. We had three TV channels - two from the Beeb and one commercial station - entertainment, particularly for an imaginative young boy was thin on the ground. Sure we had our cartoons but they only played at certain times of the day, the rest of the time the small screen seemed obsessed with soap operas, game shows and current affairs. Hardly the material designed to stimulate young minds.

All in all you'd think we were starved of exciting adventure stories designed to stir the blood, but there was one avenue open to us. There was one medium offering wildly entertaining stories whenever the fancy took us. That was the comic book - the newsagents shelves were stuffed full of books with titles like Tiger, Warlord, Battle, Victor, Action - they cost pennies (I think the average price of a comic book when I started buying on a regular basis was around 5p) and yet provided entertainment worth many times that paltry sum.

In the far off United States (a country that seemed so exciting to any British kid) the comic book industry was dominated by colourful stories of super heroes, but in the UK super heroes, with very few exceptions, failed to take off. If Superman's capsule had crashed down in Clacton instead of the Mid-West, then Kal-Ell would have been grounded from the off. It wasn't that British comic books were any less fantastic, but  by and large the settings for our tales were far more grounded in reality. Of course we had our science fiction strips, Dan Dare and so forth but for pulse pounding adventure it was the war comics to which we turned.

War comics were always popular in the UK - And for decades after the guns of the second world war fell silent, British kids celebrated our victory over the Nazis in wonderfully drawn, black and white comic books. Characters like Lord Peter Flint kept a stiff upper lip while besting evil Nazi spies, Union Jack Jackson fought alongside the Americans and usually got them out of some tough spots, and the Rat Pack were too good at Hun killing to leave rotting in a high security prison. In skilfully drawn pages scores of humble Tommies stood up to the might of the enemy and gained victories against incredible odds.

By the time I started reading comics in the early 1970's there was already a rich history of boy's adventure comics - Victor, Valiant, Lion were the hot titles but these belonged to the previous generation and it was newer titles like Warlord from DC Thompson and Battle Picture Weekly from IPC that caught my imagination.

Warlord first hit the stands in 1974 and was far grittier than the usual war comics for sale during that period - so successful was it that rival publisher, IPC launched Battle Picture Weekly in order to snare some of the readers eager for this new kind of comic book reader.

Warlord was the first UK title to be dedicated solely to war stories, other comics usually contained several genres. And right from the start it set the bar very high in terms of artwork and storytelling.

Battle Picture Weekly, first published in 1975, was launched directly as a result of the success that rival publisher, D C Thomson were scoring with Warlord, and to my mind became far the superior title. With a creative team that included Pat Mills and John Wagner how could it not be! This was the comic that would one day feature a truly groundbreaking first world war strip by Pat Mills, called Charley's War which remains arguably the best war strip ever produced.

“Pat (Mills)  and John ( Wagner) wrote the initial episodes and then farmed them out to other writers. GFD ( Gerry Finley Day) was the author of D-Day Dawson. Lofty’s One-Man Luftwaffe – that was John and Pat. Their brief was not only to create a new title but bring new talent into the industry. We’d worked with a bed-rock of people. When you launched a new title, you rang up Tom Tully, he would do four of the new strips, Ted Cowan – people of that era – Ken Mennall. A lot of the people in Battle #1 were new to me."  Original Battle Staff Editor, Dave Hunt.

Perhaps the main difference between Warlord and Battle were rooted in the British class system. Battle felt working class, while Warlord seemed to be establishment. No better is this illustrated than in the original flagship characters in each title. Warlord had Lord Peter Flint, a wartime secret agent who when not away saving the country, was living the life of a wealthy aristocrat, his pleasures no doubt funded by the tax payer. But Battle's answer to the character was Mike Nelson, a working class bruiser who was billed as Britain's deadliest secret agent. And where Lord Peter Flint believed in giving the enemy a fair shake, Mike Nelson had no such morals - in the very first frame of his first appearance in Battle he shoots a German soldier in the back.

The original Major Easy

Now back in the day I read both Warlord and Battle, but Battle soon became my publication of choice. Where Warlord's heroes would dispose of the enemy with ease and then return home for tea and cakes, Battle's heroes seemed to bleed. The Mike Nelson character would become less important to Battle as the title found its true identity. The first adventure would run until May 1975, and although the character returned from time to time, it was the other strips that became reader favourites. Strips like Rat Pack, about a group of convict soldiers, was a huge success with readers, as was D- Day Dawson and in 1976 Battle introduced a character that became so iconic that he has been re-invented as Cursed Earth Koburn in the pages of Judge Dredd Magazine. This character was Major Easy, created by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra, a laid back James Coburn lookalike who usually fought the war from a horizontal position.

MAJOR EASY LIVES ON AS CURSED EARTH COBURN

It was in 1979 that Battle finally came of age, with the strip Charley's War which was written by Pat Mills and drawn initially by Joe Colquhoun. This was a different kind of war story. For one thing it was set in the First World War, when most adventure strips tended to favour the second world conflict, and for another it was an anti-war strip. YEP, AN ANTI WAR STRIP IN A WAR COMIC!!!!

'I did not want Battle to glorify war, and Charley's War is an anti-war story," said Mills. "I think that in the 1970s and 80s it was legitimate, more so than it is today, to describe the Great War as a tragedy, a mistake and criticise the incompetence of generals. In 2014, revisionists have been trying to improve the image of the generals." Pat Mills.



Charley's War is a true work of literature - a harrowing, intricately drawn look at the Great War as seen through the eyes of working class, semi-literate Charley Bourne. Pat Mills took the inspired method of telling much of the story through young Charley's diary. The strip was truly groundbreaking, featuring not gung-ho adventure but a look at the war as it truly must have been.

'A combination of well-researched and heartfelt scriptwriting, Pat’s work is the antithesis of the ‘war is hell’ gung-ho Sergeant Rock-style story. While never doubting for a second the heroism of the brave men in the trenches, The Great War is shown to be the tragedy it was, a meat-grinder that took the lives of millions of soldiers and set the stage for the even greater horrors of World War Two. On a personal note, Charley’s War was the first comic I ever read to show the heroism of the many thousands of Irish soldiers who fought in The Great War. Hitherto we were portrayed, if at all, as ignorant savages, vilely insulting caricatures the likes of which even Punch would have hesitated to use (one notable earlier example in comics featured an Irish soldier who went into the fray with a pot of Irish stew). The artwork for Charley’s War was provided by Joe Colquhoun, one of comics’ great unsung heroes. The Gustave Doré of British comics, Colquhoun created beautiful expressive storytelling week-in week-out. Both Joe and Pat put their hearts into Charley’s War, and readers of all ages were drawn to the care evident in their work.' By Steve Earls click for full article

'We often imagine that Armageddon is a horror that awaits us sometime in the future. But Armageddon has already happened. It was World War One." Pat Mills




Charley's War are available as a series of handsome graphic novels from Titan Books.


These days the British comic industry seems to consist of 2000AD and a plethora of licenced titles with the free cover gift more important than the stories between the covers, and the days of true variety in British comics is a distant memory - The Spectator bemoaned the lack of a British comic book industry in this article HERE

Pat Mills can be found here

For a history of Warlord
For a history of Battle

Images from the front line -

The Sarge was another popular Battle character

Battle's Johnny Red